New initiative launched aimed at improving the public’s health

Health Education England (HEE), Public Health England and NHS England have joined forces and committed to helping improve the public’s health by encouraging all those who have contact with the public to talk about their health and wellbeing.

This commitment to the Making Every Contact Count (MECC) approach has been set out in a joint consensus statement. The statement sets out how the partners will work together to maximise support for population behaviour change and help individuals and communities significantly reduce their risk of disease

Many long-term diseases affecting the population are closely linked to known behavioural risk factors such as tobacco, hypertension, alcohol, being overweight or being physically inactive change and MECC can help individuals and communities significantly reduce their risk of disease.

The statement recommends that MECC should be applied across all of the health and social care landscape, and describes the joint commitments by all partner organisations. This includes: 

• maximising opportunities for raising awareness of population behaviour change approaches including MECC, within relevant national communications activities and strategies and
• embedding the principles of MECC , where possible, into training pathways, to support the translation into the everyday practice of frontline staff across health and social care.

This work builds upon other national MECC activity HEE has contributed to such as the implementation guide, quality marker checklist for training resources and evaluation framework launched at our MECC conference held at the end of January, at which partners showcased many examples of adopting the MECC approach, in order to encourage further take up of the MECC approach, and support and promote behaviour change amongst the public.